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Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu

Information

The Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū is the public art gallery of the city of Christchurch in New Zealand. The Gallery’s collection includes a small number of Dutch and Flemish paintings from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Highlights include Gerrit Berckheyde’s A View in Cologne with St. Gereon’s Basilica (1670-1698); Gaspar van Wittel’s topographical scene The Colosseum Seen from the Southeast (ca. 1700); and Gerrit Dou’s The Physician (1653). Other seventeenth-century works include a flower still life by the Flemish painter Jan Frans van Son and Joost Droochsloot’s Soldiers in a Village (1640s), a vivid portrayal of mercenary troops confiscating property and driving Dutch villagers from their homes during the Thirty Years’ War. The eighteenth century is represented by a watercolor of the Grote Kerk in Haarlem by Cornelis Pronk, as well as works by Meindert Hobbema, Matthijs Naiveu (a pupil of Dou), and paintings of ancient cattle breeds by the animal painter Balthazar Paul Ommeganck. 

Alongside its paintings, the Christchurch Art Gallery holds a modest number of Dutch and Flemish prints dating from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Among these are four engravings from Andreas Cellarius’s renowned cosmographical atlas the Harmonia Macrocosmica, three etchings by Rembrandt van Rijn, and several works by Jan van de Velde. The collection also includes Jacob Jordaens’s etching Mercury Slaying Argus (1652). Notable prints by Lucas van Leyden—such as The Crucifixion (1521) from his series The Passion—are represented, as are three engravings by Hendrick Goltzius: Titus Manlius Torquatus (ca. 1586) from the series Roman Heroes; Neptune (ca. 1592); and Saturn (1592). Other artists featured in the print holdings include Lucas Vorsterman the Younger, Pieter Jode, Johannes Janson, Jacobus Houbraken, Karel Dujardin, and Dancker Danckerts.